i7 920 vs i7 860 direct test comparison

[123bob]

I agree, they are equal crunchers, as was expected. The 860 may be more power-efficient at 3,7Ghz, however, judging from the LGA1156 and 1366 CPUs I have tried until now, this picture changes dramatically if you go to around 4Ghz. Almost all Lynnfield CPUs seem to require vast amounts of Vcore to handle 4Ghz, 1,4V seems like average, while most D0 920's can do 4Ghz at around 1,25V. I compared an X3450 running 4Ghz (bad one.. 1,43V and crunching at 87C for this test ) to an average i7 and came up with ~44W less for the 920 with otherwise identical setups (PSU, GPU, SSD identical).

Agreed. Something less than 4 gig, so far, seems to be the 860 sweet spot, based on my data and Emu's 4 gig power data. The key will be in the production numbers. If 3.7 vs 4 gig makes substantial production differences, then the scale tips to the 920 for some people's cases.

I'm going there next.

See ya'll at 4 gig....
Bob